Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of electronic meetings and more particularly to a method and system for transmitting data to participants in larger scale electronic meetings.
Description of the Related Art
The rapid development of the Internet has led to advanced modes of communication and collaboration. Using the Internet as a backbone, individuals worldwide can converge in cyberspace to share ideas, documents and images in a manner not previously possible through conventional telephony and video conferencing. To facilitate collaboration over the Internet, a substantial collection of technologies and protocols have been assembled to effectively deliver audio, video and data over the single data communications medium of the Internet. These technologies include instant messaging, Internet telephony, application sharing, and electronic meetings.
However, there is a significant scalability problem that can occur during electronic meetings which include a large number of participants. One problem is triggered when a meeting event, such as a slide change, causes all of the participants to make a request to the e-meeting server for the new slide at exactly the same time, thereby overloading the server. In such a case, the network around the server can also overload, causing significant packet losses at the network routers between the servers and client participants, as well as a poor overall meeting experience due to latency. Therefore, it would be desirable to conduct e-meetings in a manner that alleviates the difficulties presented by larger scale meetings.
Furthermore, it should also be recognized that moderators of particular e-meetings are often tailoring their presentations towards a specific audience or group. In addition to this core group, certain ancillary participants may join the meeting to simply listen, or to add input on a smaller scale that makes a lesser impact on the meeting. Therefore it may not be as important to provide refreshes of meeting events to such ancillary participants at the same time as the main, targeted group of participants.
It would desirable therefore, to provide a method and system for preventing the overload problems associated with large scale e-meetings, which also recognizes that varied nature of e-meeting participants, so as to more efficiently transmit data to the participants, and thereby improve the overall meeting experience.